True Image 10 Home Won't Restore

I have a Dell Latitude C640 laptop and I need to upgrade the hard drive.
I made a backup of the entire drive and then verified it, however I cannot restore it to the new drive. Here are some details:

Creating the backup was successful.
The backup image verified.
I can explore and mount the backup image and extract individual files.
The Acronis recovery boot CD boots and allows me to select the backup image, which is on a network share.
I created a BartPE CD with the TI plugin and this also boots and allows me to select the backup image.
The new drive is formatted as NTFS.
I can install Windows XP SP2 onto the new drive from an installation CD.

Here is what happens (using the last released build of True Image 10 Home):

When using the Acronis Recovery CD I can select the backup image, select the hard drive to restore to, but then when I confirm the operation it immediately reboots the PC without doing anything.

When using the BartPE CD I can select the backup image, select the hard drive to restore to, then when I confirm the operation it immediately closes True Image without doing anything.

The backup image is NTFS, C:, 37Gb. The new drive is NTFS, C:, 150Gb.

I've wasted about 12 hours on this and I am losing confidence in True Image. I've contacted Acronis support but no response yet. Can anyone help before I give up completely?

Checking the Dell web site it appears that you received the software on CD’s. There should be two or more. If that’s true it’s unlikely that you have any hidden partitions. You might try going into Disk Management (Start -> Run and enter diskmgmt.msc) then press OK. This will open the Disk Management screen. See if any FAT or FAT32 partitions show up. These would be the hidden partitions.

If you only have the one Windows partition and want to try doing the restore locally, you could do the following:

Boot to either BartPE or the XP install CD and create two partitions on the new drive. Make the first one Primary, Active NTFS and the second one either Primary or Logical and NTFS and large enough to hold your backup image (>37GB).

Then copy the image file from the network share (using BartPE) to the second partition.

Finally, start TI and select the image on the second partition. Choose to restore just the C: (Windows) partition and set the destination as the first partition. You can also restore the MBR if you want, just make sure to do it in separate steps. Also, don't do an Entire Disk Image restore as that will erase your second partition and the backup image.

The space from the second partition can be recovered by using the SZ trick or any standard partitioning program that supports resizing.

I think you need to look at what you're trying to achieve and whether you're using the correct method to achieve it.
For restoring partitions or the whole disk onto the same drive then creating an image is the way you should do it.
However, for replacing an existing hard drive the better way to go about it is by cloning your existing drive onto the new drive, rather than restoring a previous image.

Paragon, like the other backup/imaging programs uses linux for the restore environment. So it's susceptile to the same kinds of probs as all the other backup/imaging progs. For any one person's particular hardware setup, one brand of program might work whereas others might not, depending on the linux drivers and and that brand's implementation of linux. Paragon has no special claim on that, as the paragon forums illustrate. Luckily, several of the brands have free trials. If you're going to shop around, be fair to yourself and look at more than just one or two brands.

Yes, but as I noted in my first post I am using a laptop. Which mean one hard drive bay.

If restoring a backup image doesn't work (well or at all), then what would you do when your hard drive dies?

Andy

Click to expand...

Your expectations of restoring a backup are entirely reasonable. (I also consider this a better way of upgrading to a larger hard drive than cloning, but that's a personal preference.) As you've discovered, there are sometimes hardware problems that interfere.

I think Mudcrab's suggestion of moving the backup image to a USB drive and attempting the restore from there is your best shot at this point.

For the network restore to work, your NIC has to perform properly under Linux, and that's less likely than having your USB ports properly supported.

If you buy a 2.5 inch drive USB encloure, you can put your new drive in it and put the image on the second partition that way so you won't even need USB support. After you have the new hard drive working, you can put your old hard drive in the enclosure as a USB backup drive. Enclosures cost less than $40 which is pretty cheap solution.

Thanks for the response. I will give a USB drive a try, however my laptop only has USB 1.1, which is a real pain.

Also I noted in my first post that I also tried the BartPE CD and that too failed, so it's not just a Linux issue. Both CDs allow me to browse network shares and select the .tib files. Once selected True Image shows me the type and size of the backup and the description of the backup. If they can do that why can't they read the .tib file also for the restore?

Acronis Support didn't read my email properly and gave me a lame suggestion. I then pointed them to this thread and now they are ignoring me. Ah well... Good job I am only upgrading my HD and it didn't die on me I suppose.

Could you please let us know your Acronis request number (e.g. [Acronis #123456]) which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? We will find out how the investigation of your issue is going. If you have not received an autoreply then please send us a Private Message containing your e-mail address.